From fish to diamonds: How blockchain can improve supply chains

Can blockchain technology, which streamlines and secures supply chain operations, operate across widely different industries?

“Yes,” says Stephan Nilsson, founder and CEO of the Oslo-based enterprise blockchain platform UNISOT. “Well, I might be persuaded,” says Sukhi Jutla, co-founder and CEO of MarketOrders, a London-based online platform for the gold and diamond jewelry industry.

The two entrepreneurs were brought together for this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, in which Charles Miller invited them to compare their respective fields—jewelry for Sukhi, and, as his first case study for UNISOT, Stephan’s experience with supply chains in the Norwegian fish industry.  

The discussion revolved around how blockchain would be utilized to establish faster and cost-effective transactions, as well as boosting transparency levels within the supply chain.

At MarketOrders, precious stones and jewels are constantly being moved from one location to another and because of this, Sukhi stresses transparency is key. “When something goes wrong during the process, who is to blame? There is no transparency in the industry.” To address the issue, MarketOrders is exploring blockchain solutions.

MarketOrders published a white paper in 2020 detailing the use of blockchain technology. One use case Sukhi mentions is the technology’s ability to provide tools that could help the company speed up payments hence avoiding large transaction fees. “We’ve got as far as creating MarketOrders Tokens. We envision this is to have an ecosystem on our platform whereby our suppliers and our customers actually settle payments using the tokens.”

Stephan couldn’t agree more with Sukhi when it comes to blockchain and transparency. UNISOT specializes in the use of blockchain to efficiently manage supply chains, starting with the seafood supply chain. He outlined some similarities between UNISOT’s objective and what MarketOrders wants to achieve. “There’s a lot of the same thing here, we have to take care of a product that is being moved around in the world, and today there are a lot of problems encountered while doing that, and that’s where this technology can help.” 

Stephan goes on to describe his experience working with Bitcoin SV, UNISOT’s preferred blockchain technology. He almost refers to it as the gold standard when it comes to scalability. “With this blockchain technology [BSV], it’s so scalable and so low cost.” 

As he points out, scalability is essential for a growing business. “You must have a system that is scalable because you don’t want to rebuild your application or your whole system every six months when a couple of developers decides to put in a new function.”  

Sukhi admits not having heard of BSV before but after speaking to Stephan about its scalability and micropayment capabilities, she was ready to explore further with Stephan, to find out about his UNISOT solution.

Stephan didn’t shy away from speaking his thoughts on Ethereum, which Sukhi had been looking at: “It doesn’t scale: Ethereum offers a lot of solutions but none of them are in production. No one has actually been able to run this production using all the functionality of the Ethereum blockchain because, it’s simply not scaling.”

The podcast capped off with a brief discussion on digital currency and its price volatility. Sukhi reacts to the recent publicity around BTC stating, “The price volatility is a huge distraction and my focus is always on the application of the technology… blockchain is actually a technology. It’s an application. It’s a different way of doing something. And in my opinion, it’s a far more trustworthy and efficient way to do a process that’s already existing.”

Stephan ended his interview with a recommendation for Sukhi and people who are interested to learn more about BSV. He suggests watching the Theory of Bitcoin with Ryan X Charles on YouTube. “It has every detail about Bitcoin,” he says, “how it was invented, how it works, and details about blockchain and a common misconception: blockchain is not a cryptographic system, it’s not a technical system, it’s an economic system.” 

Hear the whole of Stephan Nilsson and Sukhi Jutla’s interviews in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations podcast or catch up with other recent episodes:

You can also watch the podcast video on YouTube.

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